


a better fate than wisdom

by elodiej



Category: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: Arthurian, Grail Quest, M/M, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - Freeform, bed tests, beheading games, the marriage of sir gawain and the dame ragnelle
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-27
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-08 20:26:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8859847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elodiej/pseuds/elodiej
Summary: A Yuletide Sir Gawain and the Green Knight AU. An axe-wielding giant comes to Camelot demanding a beheading game, but Fai's quest to receive a blow for a blow makes the last few days of his life even more complicated when he makes a bet of equivalent exchange with Kurogane.





	1. Fitt the First

**Author's Note:**

> Now þenk wel, Sir Gawan,  
> For woþe þat þou ne wonde  
> Þis auenture for to frayn  
> Þat þou hatz tan on honde.
> 
> _Sir Gawain, have a care_  
>  _to keep your courage for the test,_  
>  _and do the deed you've dared._  
>  _You've begun: now brave the rest._  
>  \- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, anonymous poet

Nine months after the giant comes to Camelot, Fai takes his horse and goes in search of the Red Chapel. The king and queen are apologetic, and for a sending-off party, the mood is somber. Tomoyo, when she’s not hovering far too close to Sakura for propriety, tries to make light and wish him well, but he knows that no one expects him to return. No one had expected it either when Fai had brought down the Red Knight’s axe on that blood-red neck and the enormous man had picked his own head up and hopped back on his horse, easy as you please, and reminded Fai to find him again in a year’s time so the blow could be returned.

He’s survived trials with the fey, and he’s survived other less personal decapitations, Tomoyo’s cart-riding escapades and countless battles with countless other colorful knights. He’s faced death before, and so with no tears and lingering hugs and a strange, oddly significant parcel of food and supplies from Her Majesty’s seneschal Watanuki’s least favorite kitchen boy, he heads off to his next inevitable demise.

Autumn turns to winter, slowly, and far from the shining happiness of Camelot, the snow and the cold comes quick and hard. There are towns, occasionally, and even less often there are inns. Mostly he stays off the beaten path because no one he meets has any knowledge of his destination, and camps where he can and takes greater care of his horse than himself.

Two months later, in late December, he comes upon a castle in the middle of the woods and a blizzard is settling in. His time is running out - he had promised to be there at the end of the year, and there’s no going back on his word. It turns out the castle is inhabited, and its owners welcoming enough when he explains his predicament.

“Stay here until the storm passes. I insist,” says the lord, who introduces himself as Kurogane. Kurogane is tall and imposing and has something familiar and implacable about his face, and he seems to forget he is married and that his wife is there, like an actor who has forgotten his lines.

“How can I repay your kindness?” asks Fai, thinking of his now-empty food stores and his only horse, the sole possessions other than his armor and insignia - a golden phoenix on a field of blue - that he had brought with him.

Something almost _wicked_ shines in Kurogane’s eyes. “Let’s make a bet. I go hunting every day, and you should stay here and rest. Whatever I win during the course of the day, I’ll give to you, and anything you receive under my roof, you must return to me.”

“As you like, Kuro-sama,” Fai says and bows, and has the great pleasure of hearing Kurogane’s polite facade be blown apart with yelling and sputtering and curses.

Perhaps the last few days of his life won’t be so bad after all.

 

When Fai wakes up in an unfamiliar bed, properly bathed and indoors for the first time in what is almost three months, it’s only temporarily disorienting. His clothes have been folded and sat in the chair next to his hugely extravagant bed, despite the conspicuous lack of any servants around the castle the previous night. Everything about the huge home feels empty, Kurogane on the hunt and his wife nowhere to be seen. Fai spends his day wandering through rooms and libraries and kitchens and dining rooms and foyers and all kinds of facilities, allowing himself the pleasure of being lost and unneeded for a time. He can’t imagine what Kurogane expects to receive from him when everything here is empty.

It reminds him painfully of his _other_ home, of a waste land by the sea. He has not thought of Ruval in a long time, and his memories of it remain as unchanged as Ruval itself surely is in life - and death, and the terrible waiting. A bloody staff, an aging king, and a procession of a head upon a platter. It had always appeared to Fai as if the head were his own, a trick he’d ascribed to old magic, to cruel curses, but here and now with nothing but another empty house he wonders if it were an omen of something else. But so he had left for Camelot, and then had left Camelot for a different Chapel Perilous.

In the midst of his maudlin reverie, Kurogane’s wife finds him in his room, in the bedside chair that had that morning held his own tunic and clothing. She is so unlike her husband, far shorter and more slight in all ways, quiet and unnervingly placid in a way that goes beyond the call of courtly manners.

“Hello, lady,” says Fai, startled.

The woman stands in his doorway and smiles gently. “You’ve been exploring. Everything here is for your use,” she says, and advances toward him. “All of it.” She steps forward, until the tips of her toes are nearly brushing Fai’s, and he resists the urge to draw up his knees to his chest and keep them away from her.

“You’re too kind, my lady,” he says, and wishes he could stand, but any graceful way out of the chair is blocked.

“Sit and talk a while.” She steps back and drags him onto the bed to sit intimate side to side, one hand on his knee. “What brings you so far from Camelot, sir knight?”

Fai swallows. “I made a promise to return a favor I received last winter.”

“You’re an honorable man,” says Kurogane’s wife, and Fai only just manages not to laugh. “In return for our hospitality, then, what shall you honor me with?”

“I promised your husband to return anything I gained here. I have nothing else to give,” he says, and tries not to look to his right, Kurogane’s wife’s face hovering at his shoulder, uncomfortably reminiscent of something once forgotten.

“Then take this and receive it well, to honor me,” she says, and takes his face in one small hand and stretches to kiss the side of his face, just missing his mouth with the little resistance he puts against the pressure on his other cheek.

He tugs away and turns to her, says, “Your gift is generous, but let’s sit and _talk_ a while, until dinner comes.”

She smiles, pretty and lacking any coyness or shame, and lets him tell tales of quests from a land not so far away until the sun goes down, and Kurogane arrives again.

 

For only one man, Kurogane’s hunt is quite successful; he brings back several rabbits, one deer and a fox, and presents them all to Fai with quiet pride.

“Everything I gained, I give to you,” he says, sitting between Fai and his wife for the meal. Outside the snow has stopped, though everything is white and dreamy crystalline. All of the food is cooked to perfection, and absently Fai wonders where the cooks who must have made it lived, or if the castle is just so labyrinthine they had never met during his wanderings.

“What brings you all the way out here, anyway?” asks Kurogane when he’s almost demolished the first course. There had been no time for lengthy explanations the night before, only a need to get out of the cold and the wild.

Fai explains the tale as he has so many times now in the last year to those who were not present. A giant appeared and asked to have his head cut off, so I obliged. It didn’t stay attached however, and so I promised to let him have a swing at me in a year’s time. “I’m looking for his chapel so I can fullfill my end of the bargain.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a death wish.” Kurogane stuffs the last of the rabbit in his mouth, nonplussed by the bizarre tale. “You could just not show. Or find some magic to trick him.”

“If I could use my magic,” Fai says, and stops, ashamed. Few people in Camelot know that he has magic - _had_ magic, though the fame of Celesian witchery has always exceeded his own reputation. There is so little of Camelot here. “I have to keep my word. And using magic - mine or otherwise - would be breaking it.”

Kurogane raises one eyebrow. “Why not? This guy doesn’t seem like he was a normal non-magical knight. Seems fair game to me.”

“It’s not about the knight. My home - my true home, where my magic comes from - is all a waste land. There’s no magic there for me to draw on.” This is not untrue, but a wave of guilt rises in Fai’s stomach anyway, and he sets down his fork and stares at the rabbit on his plate. He did not promise Kurogane honesty, though he feels bound to it; all he owes this stranger is a stolen kiss.

“There’s plenty of magic here though,” says Kurogane, and sips his wine. “Seems stupid not to use it to me.”

“I don’t think you understand magic at all,” says Fai. He forces a laugh, practiced at years of sitting at the Round Table, of becoming a knight and all the trials both abroad and at home it required. “I won’t take your advice, and even if I did I’d have to return it. Instead, I’ll give you this.”

He stands and walks over to Kurogane’s side, grasping the far side of his face like Kurogane’s wife had done to him earlier, and bends over to kiss his cheek, the barest touch he can bring himself to give. Kurogane whips his head up to stare at Fai, an accusation, but Fai is already turning away. “It’s not polite to kiss and tell,” he says, “and that wasn’t in our bet, Kuro-pon. Good night.”

As he leaves, he sees Kurogane’s wife, until now forgotten, smiling serenely after him.

 

That night, he dreams of other contests, of quests not yet lived, of other beheading games. He dreams that he and Tomoyo and Doumeki are lost in a woods and they stumble upon Kurogane’s castle. Tomoyo begs for lodging, persuasive, and Kurogane allows them into a house that is more alive than its real counterpart - it is full of wild dogs and bears and boars and bulls and lions, and all manner of beasts.

“A blow for a blow,” says Kurogane, standing amidst the beasts that watch with hollow eyes and holding out a spear. Doumeki and Tomoyo’s hands go to swords they are not wearing, looking at the beasts.

Fai looks at only Kurogane instead, and knows what is being asked. He takes the spear.

“A blow for a blow,” he says, and throws the spear at Kurogane’s head - and Kurogane dodges, and there is blood dripping down his left arm where the spear had grazed - and Kurogane retrieves the spear and grins, wild as a curse, and Tomoyo and Doumeki do not move, are no longer _there_ , and Kurogane throws the spear in return while Fai stands and waits and watches the spear hurtle toward his chest -

And wakes.


	2. Interlude

As autumn drew near, the royal couple sent Tomoyo to him. Child of the lake, closer to the fey than anyone else in court, he understood their reasoning - but he only wished to be maudlin and Tomoyo would only wish to drag him out of despair.

“I have hated your unflappable good cheer since the day we met,” Fai says, leaning over the goblet of ale Tomoyo brought with her has a peace offering.

“You gave me your horse anyway,” says Tomoyo, and only grins and sips her own ale. “Somehow you always find trouble even when you try to be level-headed.”

“You had rode your horse half to death, you monster. Hopping in carts, crossing sword bridges, _multiple_ near-seductions, beheadings, getting kidnapped, and moreover never letting us know who you were until the last possible moment. I only drowned for a little while, which seems infinitely less irritating than what you put yourself through.” He smiles, though. From the sitting room in his chambers he can see the jousting field, and the forest beyond, now aglow with the setting sun against a mass of red and orange. He will miss Camelot, he thinks, after this whole affair is through. As much as it is possible to miss something when you are dead.

“And speaking of beheadings -” Tomoyo begins.

“Let’s not talk of beheadings,” moans Fai, and props his head up with one hand on his cheek. “All anyone wants to talk about these days is beheadings. Or to conspicuously _not_ talk about them - do you know that they’ve started altering some songs to dance around the subject? Oh, no, Sir Rondart was not _beheaded_ by Her Majesty’s champion Tomoyo but merely _killed_.”

“The queen worries after you. So does the king.”

 _And you would know about the queen_ , Fai thinks, but some things are too cruel to speak out loud. Tomoyo has already sacrificed a great deal for the queen, and he knows she would again; it’s none of his business if she chooses the poison of courtly love willingly. He loves Tomoyo too dearly to say anything against her or stop himself from thinking things so unkind.

Instead he says, “I’m not actually dying, you know.”

Tomoyo levels a look at him that nearly makes him put his hands in his lap and stare demurely down at them out of shame. “You’re acting like you might as well be. Go on a quest or something. Live a little.”

“Life is highly overrated.”

“Come and model gowns for me then, if you dislike all the trappings of being alive. It won’t help the queen’s wardrobe, true, but it would please her greatly. And me.”

“You,” says Fai, “are extremely unfair.”

“Watanuki often attends,” she continues, “and sometimes so does that kitchen boy he dislikes so much - the one with the pretty hands. The queen is very fond of him, to Watanuki’s consternation. He reminds me of you, you know.”

“Two very miserable people in the room sounds like one two many.” Fai takes another drink. The ale, at least, is more palatable than the life Tomoyo is trying to give him. “No, no, I know that isn’t what you mean. I’ve no desire to be your mannequin or infuriate Sir Seneschal any more than strictly necessary. I’ll attend the queen any time she likes - or the king. I promise that much.”

Tomoyo pauses. “If you’re waiting for a royal order, I think you’ll regret it. Her Majesty’s kind heart might order you all the way home.”

“I _am_ home,” says Fai, although it rings hollow. His mouth is dry again, despite his nearly-empty goblet. “You and I both know about not going back.”

“And so the warning.” She has the good grace to at least let the somberness grow for a moment, no smiles left. He’s never asked about who she was before Camelot, though the stories told by others are legendary and frequent, and she has never asked him about his past. He has always thought she could tell why it was a topic best avoided in the same way he knew past the legends that hers is not dissimilar. “I came to warn you not to waste away in solitude, and the queen has the power to enforce my gentle advice.”

“She wouldn’t.”

Fai watches Tomoyo stand, straighten, strech out her arms as if she were leaving for a tournament. As if she had just undergone some arduous work.

“Perhaps not.” Tomoyo smiles quick like an arrow and walks toward him. “I hope we never need to find out for sure. Remember that this is home because it is where the people who love you live,” she says, and kisses him on the top of his head, straining on the tips of her toes to reach even though he’s still slouched in his chair.

“Enjoy the ale,” she calls out as she leaves Fai’s room without turning around, waving one hand genially as she leaves.

He watches her go, and then looks to the half-full decanter of ale on his table. Outside, the sun has set, and the night chill is beginning to creep in. He should light a fire; he should go to the kitchens in search of food; he should call upon his queen before the night is done. But not tonight. He takes the decanter in hand and moves to the window, balancing on the stone ledge by bracing his back on one side and his legs on the other, looking out over the place he now calls home. Tomorrow, perhaps, he will live until the winter winds carry him elsewhere. Until then, he will sit and think, and finish Tomoyo’s ale, and wait for the inevitable to find him.


	3. Fitt the Second

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Sofja, Gaia, and Rob for their very, very helpful input on this chapter.

The second afternoon, Kurogane’s wife returns with an offering.

Fai sleeps in late until the light of noon hits his face and he can no longer entertain the illusion that in a moment he’ll doze off again. The past months’ sleep has been hard-won, and he’s loathe to waste his last opportunity to sleep in until the long sleep of death overtakes him. Before he can gather the will to right himself and begin dressing, the door to his room creaks open and Kurogane’s wife softly pads over to his bed and climbs on top of the cover next to him.

He pretends to sleep for a while longer, face pressed into the pillow below him, but time marches on and the body beside him doesn’t move at all. When he rolls toward the center of the bed and finds her face incredibly close to his own, still smiling softly, he nearly shrieks with the shock of it and only just manages to regain whatever is left of his honor to greet her.

It’s the same routine as yesterday, already too well-worn on the second iteration: too much closeness even when he coaxes her to sit on the edge of the bed instead; awkward suggestion that is too innocent to be innuendo but makes him just as nervous.

This time, however, she’s brought a gift with her.

“Take this token to remind you of me when you are gone and travelling,” she says, pressing too-warm metal into his palm. “It’s magicked - you cannot be made to forget anything while you wear it, so take it and remember me.”

He protests; he has nothing to give, could give nothing willingly in return. He turns their hands over and presses the ring back into her palm without grasping it, and the ring sears a circle into his hand.

“Then let me kiss you,” says Kurogane’s wife, insistent, serene, grasping Fai’s hand with unexpected strength as she is perched on the bedside next to him.

Fai permits this - two kisses, and while the ring burns his hands Kurogane’s wife’s lips on his are cool and soft. When she’s done, she commands, “Tell me me a story,” and powerless, Fai does.

“Far away from here, long ago in Camelot’s distant past, once there was a king who was kind and just and very powerful. For ten years he ruled peacefully over his kingdom, and he spent his days with all his court riding in the forest on the hunt. One day while riding in the forest, far ahead of the rest of his court, he came across a cruel knight who claimed the land there had been unlawfully stolen from him by the same king he found before him, and threatened to kill the king unless he could answer a riddle. The king, concerned by his accusation, asks only for a little time, and the wicked knight agrees. In exactly a year, the king and the knight would return to the same spot in the same forest and if the king did not provide the correct answer, the knight would chop off the king’s head. The king asked for the question, so that he might find the answer the knight was seeking.

‘Tell me this in one year’s time,’ said the wicked knight. ‘What is it that women most desire?’

The king, bound by his great honor, agreed, and rejoined his court and recounted the story of the knight he had met. All of his knights and and ladies were appalled, but the king was not swayed by their concern: he had made a promise, and in order to keep it, he traveled his lands in search of an answer.

For nearly a year he traveled far and wide, and asked the riddle he had been tasked to many different people, and received nearly as many different responses. Months and seasons passed, and he came no closer to knowing what answer to give the knight. When the day of his ordained meeting had nearly arrived, he journeyed back to his castle with a heavy heart, unsure of his fate. On the road he met an ancient woman in the forest, and stopping for a while he explained his troubles and asked her the same question he had asked so many times before.

‘What is it that women most desire?’ he said to the old woman.

The woman smiled. ‘I know the knight of which you speak,’ she said. ‘He desires the inheritance which has rightly passed to me, for he had intended to usurp it but I had married another. Now I am widowed, and he seeks to take everything I have and me with it. I know the answer to your riddle, and I’ll tell you if you grant me one favor.’

The king quickly agreed - he would give her anything within his power if she could provide him the answer he sought.

The old woman leaned in close to the king and whispered both the favor she desired and the riddle’s solution, and thanking her profusely he told her to travel to his castle to wait for him there. He would travel to meet the wicked knight, and when the challenge had been won,  he would return and fulfill the bargain he had made.

The king left for the forest, and the old woman for the royal castle. One year from their last meeting, the king waited for the wicked knight to give his newly-won answer. When the wicked knight appeared, ax in hand, the king got down from his horse and showed that he had come unarmed in good faith.

‘So, king, tell me - what is it that women most desire?’ said the wicked knight.

The king smiled, the same way the old woman had when he had asked her that same question. ‘What women most desire,’ he said, ‘is sovereignty.’

The wicked knight grew wretched and wrathful, but the good king had bested his challenge; what women most desire, of course, is the power to make their own decisions. Triumphant, the king returned home to much celebration and joy, and after the welcoming party and the tearful reunions with his children, he returned to the old woman to fulfill his promise.

Widowed himself, the good king married the old woman as he had promised. The wicked knight could no longer claim any stake in the land and lady he had tried to take, and all of what she had would go to the king’s daughter and son who were as kind and good and just as their father when they came of age, so the old woman was finally happy. On their wedding night when they returned to their rooms, he found that his new wife was now transformed. She was young and beautiful, and the king asked what had happened.

‘Many, many years ago, I married a very powerful wizard. He tried to be kind, and good, and we lived together happily. But he died when we were both young, and his magic was stronger than his kindness and his goodness, and on his deathbed he wished that I might live until I found happiness again. Since then I have been cursed, unable to die until I found happiness again,’ the woman, now young, explained. ‘With the wicked knight bested and your kindness here, the curse of his last wish is nearly lifted. I can continue my life as I was when death left me all those years ago, or I can continue to live with the weight of my years as you had seen me before. The choice is yours.’

The king thought about this, but not for very long. It was a very sad way to live in either case, he thought, trapped by the weight of someone else’s expectations. ‘I choose whatever you wish,’ said the good king.

The moment the king gave up his choice, the woman began to age rapidly, cycling through all the years she had just lost. ‘Thank you. I only wanted to die,’ she sighed, and disintegrated into dust and then nothingness.

The king mourned the woman, and built a monument in the forest where the wicked knight had challenged him so that all his subjects and especially his children, who would inherit all the land and wisdom she had gifted them, would remember her and the lesson he had learned.”

“I don’t like that story at all,” says Kurogane’s wife when Fai is done with the telling. “I don’t like that story one bit.”

Fai only laughs, and nods, and agrees, and then they are quiet until dusk returns anew.

 

That evening, Kurogane and Fai take their dinner in Kurogane’s study, which is far less spacious than the rest of the chambers Fai had visited the day before and far more lived in, far more  _ alive _ than anywhere else he’s seen so far. Kurogane keeps the fire going as he recounts the details of the hunt that day, slightly less spectacular than the day before but still frighteningly impressive.

Fai lets himself sink into the warmth and the soft fabric of the bench on which he reclines, too exhausted by keeping Kurogane’s wife company and her behavior to care about propriety or reputation. It turned out there are benefits to being a dead man walking, like no longer needing to care about almost anything. He does care about the cadence of Kurogane’s voice, his methodical and factual approach to storytelling, the way he stares at the fireplace while Fai stares at the ceiling and eye contact is not required to hold the conversation.

“Everything I gained I give to you,” says Kurogane like an incantation.

Fai sits up to find Kurogane staring at him as he stands and puts the poker away so he can sit in the singular chair near the fireplace. It wasn’t a question, exactly, but it demands an answer. It’s harder to be sharp and wild when he’s unusually full and warm and comfortable.

“As for my gains,” says Fai, and stretches as he stands too. There is no easy way to do this, but then, it is the easiest thing he has left to do before the New Year.  Kurogane only watches flat-faced as he approaches. “Everything  _ I _ gained, I give to you.”

Excitement unfurls in his chest like spring blooming when Kurogane continues to watch him as he slowly, carefully slots his legs around Kurogane’s, kneeling as best he can on the edges of the chair and hovering just above Kurogane’s thighs. He braces one arm on the back of the chair, leaning on Kurogane’s shoulder for balance. Kurogane’s eyebrows look as if they’ll take rise right past his hairline, but Kurogane doesn’t move a muscle which is acquiescence enough.

This time, Fai kisses Kurogane on the mouth, soft and deliberate. One, as it was given to him. He pauses, eyes closed, the tip of his nose resting against the tip of Kurogane’s. He moves forward again, firmer now, and Kurogane’s arm rises, Kurogane’s broad palm spanning the curve of his back, tugging him closer. It’s not at all like the kiss Kurogane’s wife had given him earlier, leaning into Kurogane’s touch with an arched back and his free hand traveling up Kurogane’s chest to his neck.

He pulls away with a wicked grin as Kurogane pushes forward. “Now we’re even, you and I.”

Kurogane scoffs. “Doesn’t feel equal to me.”

“You really should value your contributions more, Kuro-tan,” Fai says. He leans back further and lets his left hand run from its place at Kurogane’s collarbone down his arm to rest on his bicep. “Ah, ah, ah!” With one finger he taps Kurogane’s nose as Kurogane’s fingers scratch lightly but insistently down his spine. “Don’t give away anything you wouldn’t wish returned.”

“Is being an absolute idiot a requirement for joining the Round Table?” Kurogane asks as he uses the hand not on Fai’s back to grab Fai’s arm and drag it away from the back of the chair, keeping his hand locked around Fai’s wrist.

Fai smiles and trails his own fingernails down the bit of Kurogane’s hand he can reach. “You should see the others. No one is ever who they seem, and quests aren’t more than follies and misfortunes we dress up for the retelling to make us sound good. Not all idiots are knights, but all knights are idiots.” He pauses. “You’re not a knight to some other lord, are you?”

“Kind of you to ask now,” huffs Kurogane. “I’m not the idiot here, am I? I’m not the one riding to my death in a couple days.”

“Oh, that,” Fai says, and breaks eye contact like a bashful maiden. “The Red Knight didn’t fare too badly when I lopped off his head, so I don’t know why you’re so worried about my wellbeing.” He thinks of Kurogane’s wife and the loathly lady. “There are worse things than dying, anyway.”

Kurogane’s laugh is sharper, darker than Fai expected it to be. He hadn’t expected Kurogane to laugh at all. “That’s true,” he says. 

Fai wants to ask about this empty castle, Kurogane’s empty-eyed wife, if Kurogane’s life here is empty too. But even with the bet between them he’s caught between propriety and curiosity. To have to speak with his wife about trivial things, and to not be able to speak with Kurogane openly about things far more important - these are burdens he bears as one of Sakura’s knights. To be  _ obedient _ and  _ deferential _ and all with grace and ease and good cheer to both lord and lady.

“Do you believe in curses?” he asks instead.

Kurogane’s thumb moves gently over the pulse at his wrist. “I never thought much about them.”

“Oh, they’re  _ very _ real.” Fai laughs softly as he leans his forehead onto Kurogane’s shoulder. “Tomorrow, if you give me a story, I might just give you one,” he whispers into Kurogane’s ear.

When Kurogane’s hand slides down his back to his thigh, Fai backs out of the chair, not unwilling but unable to stay. Obedience, deference, grace; the art and craft of owning a horse. For just one more night, there will be tomorrow.

 

The second night, Fai dreams of Yuuko.

“In some of the stories, the old woman doesn’t marry the king,” she says by way of greeting.

They’re back in Fai’s room at the castle, from so many months ago now, where Yuuko has never been. He smiles, and lets himself sprawl over the well-cushioned chair that is his greatest indulgence at home. “In some of the stories, the old woman imprisons the wicked knight in stone by tricking him into a magic cave, and there’s no need for marriage.”

“In some of the stories,” Yuuko says, “the old woman isn’t so old, but she keeps on living, and living, and living, still bound by her widow’s curse, and outlives the king and everyone else. Unable to fulfill one wish, she passes her endless time by granting certain wishes to others.”

“So I’ve been told.”

She’s reclining on his bed, languorous, smoking a pipe, dressed in long black robes, and there are no lines of aging on her face. At every pause, she blows a ring of smoke that is a perfect circle. “And what do you wish, Sir Bird of May?”

So many things - and so many prices. He thinks of beheadings. He thinks of games, and outstanding debts. He dreams of spring. “I want - I don’t want to die, not yet,” he confesses, because he knows he is dreaming. “There are still things I have to do. I don’t want to stop here.”

Yuuko smiles like a cat that got the cream. “I can grant you that,” she says.

“The price -”

“Has already been paid,” she finishes, waving the pipe in slow circles. “A long time ago, you weren’t the only one with that wish. Take what is given to you, and please, Yuui - don’t waste it.”

She dissolves with the smoke of her pipe into the air, but Fai doesn’t wake from his dream for a long time after.


End file.
